Downtown Canoga Park to get more bike racks

Work continues on the Orange Line busway and bike path; we'll have an update ready for you early in the New Year...

The Sherman Way corridor in Downtown Canoga Park will soon be getting more bike racks. Yesterday, Assistant Bicycle Coordinator Jose Elias and myself walked the corridor between Canoga Ave. and Jordan Ave. to mark racks wherever we could. In all, we were able to mark 14 bike racks in front of a variety of businesses ranging from salons to body art studios. The new racks will help address the area’s already high bicycle parking demand – demand that will no doubt increase once the Metro Orange Line Extension busway and bike path open sometime next year. Speaking of the Orange Line, we also got the opportunity to check out how construction is progressing. You can view those photos on our Flickr stream here.

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7 Responses

The Canoga Park area of Sherman Way is the route I have taken hundreds of times to and from work at the corner of Roscoe Blvd/Fallbrook ave. It does have a lot of biking for the area, but most of it is on the sidewalk. It’s a wide and fairly comfortable street to bike on until you get to the Topanga Canyon intersection, where the bicyclist is squeezed into the moving lane going west, just past the intersection up until you reach the bike lane. I’ve ridden Sherman Way east of Canoga Ave and I’m confident that the amount of unused space on the street will make it easy to add bike lanes.

Canoga Ave will be one of the few places in the L.A area that will have a lite bike path within a few feet of a street, which is similar to how the Netherlands creates most bikeways for major city streets. Parts of the Orange Line along Victory Blvd and Oxnard St also are next to a street and the San Fernando Blvd bike path is another area. I’m curious to see how much utilitarian bicycling will be created by the addition of the Canoga bike path. Canoga Ave is not a major street and so the utility use of it could be to connect to the Topanga Canyon mall area, the Canoga Park business district along Sherman Way, in addition to the last mile hookup to the Orange Line or Metro link.

It’s encouraging to see LADOT install bike racks in the surrounding areas of new bike lanes or paths. I whole heartedly endorse that approach, and it should help to increase the cycling rate.

Looking at a map, I counted 7 middle or high schools within a reasonable distance of the bike path. Schools would be a potentially large source of cyclists for a bike path, if there are bicycle friendly streets to connect the school to the bike path, and to where they live. It’s unilkely that you will convert many drivers to using a bicycle for utilitarian purposes in the west end of the valley, as the speed and convenience of driving trumps a bicycle in most instances, plus the destinations are much more spread out compared to many other areas of the city.

The Orange Line bike path is too narrow. It tries to squeeze in bikes in both directions, plus pedestrians, with nothing except painted lines separating them, and most importantly, nothing to encourage pedestrians to stay out of the bike section. Accidents involving major injuries have already happened, involving near paralysis. In the past, DOT had the excuse that this is as good as any other bike path that they know of. DOT does not have that excuse any more. The Orange Line has many many feet to spare. They bike path could have easily been wider. Bike paths should not mix pedestrians with bicycles, and white lines are not enough of a separation. The bike path cannot handle heavy traffic. It should be wider, and it must separate, clearly, pedestrian from bikes.

One of the photos shows a dual sidewalk ramp for the cyclist to cross the street from the bike path. That’s an improvement over the single ramps on the existing Orange Line Path that are usually not in line with the path.

Why is it though that the busway does not have a angled ramp at the intersections and the path does? A sidewalk crosses the busway and the path, so the reason can’t be due to ADA requirements as the sidewalk, where it meets the busway, would be in violation. There is no angled ramp for the busway for the same reason there generally are no ramps for motorized traffic street intersections, it impedes the speed of vehicles.

Angled ramps at intersections are one of the strongest obstacles to riding the Orange Line path for utilitarian purposes, and it continues to demonstrate how cyclists are not thought of as a legitimate form of transportation in Los Angeles. It’s as if cyclists are considered to be recreational users, or perhaps it’s designed specifically for pedestrians and people on bicycles are allowed to use it also.

Dutch engineer Hillie Talens pointed out at the ThinkBike workshop that most bicycles do not have suspensions and so the road surface must be made flat for cycling in order to make it comfortable, otherwise people will not ride. That’s why the Netherlands designs bike paths that are not uncomfortable when crossing intersections or driveways at a high rate of speed. Driveways and many intersections have raised sections to make drivers more aware of pedestrians or cyclists.

Interrupting the flow of cycling by making bikes stop at most intersections is another reason the current Orange Line path is not irresistable for biking. It’s much faster to simply ride in the street where you do not have to stop nearly as often.

Most people with transportation choices will choose a fast, comfortable and easy way to get somewhere. Slowing down the bicycle with stops or ramps makes travel by car or bus more desirable.

When Metro did surveys asking people the distance they traveled by bike to arrive at a Orange Line or rail station, it turned out the average was about two miles for rail or BRT. The average distance traveled by bike in the Netherlands is about the same, which shows that average bike usage tends to be no more than a fifteen minute ride.

So, wouldn’t it signicantly increase the convenience and encourage bicycling to and from a transit station, to have bike parking in front of businesses for at least a minimum continuous distance of two miles from each station, instead of just up to a few blocks away? For example, there will be a Orange Line station at Sherman Way, which means there should be bike parking continuously for least two miles east of the station and two miles west where business are located along the corridor.

It should be a standard procedure to put in bike parking continuously along business corridors for at least a two mile radius of a rail or a BRT station.

[…] bicycle parking at destinations near the stations. Back in December, we targeted downtown Canoga Park near the future Sherman Way station. Just this week, we went out and marked an additional 13 racks […]

[…] bicycle parking at destinations near the stations. Back in December, we targeted downtown Canoga Park near the future Sherman Way station. Just this week, we went out and marked an additional 13 racks […]